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Wikipedians are ‘closed’ and ‘disagreeable’

DISAGREEABLE and closed to new ideas – that’s the picture that emerges of Wikipedia contributors from a survey of their psychological attributes.

Yair Amichai-Hamburger at the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel, and his team gave a personality test to 69 Wikipedia contributors. As he expected, the “Wikipedians” were more comfortable online than in the “real world”. But he was surprised that contributors scored low for agreeableness and openness to new ideas, given that contributing to the website is based on sharing knowledge (CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol 6, p 679).

Amichai-Hamburger speculates that Wikipedians make their contributions online because …